Some of you may be aware of a healing questionaire that’s been doing the rounds of the blogosphere lately.  Well Hinenuitepo over at Death Goddess has adapated it for we dps types, and suggested that I take part.  Which is an excellent idea.  There’s been far too much namby-pamby, lovey-dovey stuff been going on in this blog lately, those tree-hugging hippy healers have practically taken over.  Let us not forget that that this is supposed to be a Mage blog, and Calli’s primary purpose in life is to turn things into small and innoffensive farmyard animals and then utterly destroy them using only the power of her mind (which now has 5% more intellect, gnome fans!).  So without further ado, let’s get down to the nitty gritty!

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary dps?
Calli, mage, usually Arcane spec.  There she is on the left, isn’t she adorable?

What is your primary dpsing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Raids.  The only time I ever log Calli is to raid or maybe do some dailies .  Most of the time I’m on an alt of some description, but when we need to bring the big guns out, I log Calli.

What is your favorite dps spell/ability for your class and why?
Invisibility is definitely, 100%, hands-down, no questions asked, the best spell mages ever had.  It’s saved me thousands of gold in repair bills.  Even if that weren’t the case, the shock on Teamspeak when everyone sees that some nab mage was the only survivor of the last wipe is always worth the ticket price.   Blink used to hold pride of place if for no other reason than you could escape a wipe on Kael’thas by Blinking through the force fields barring exit from his throne room, but Invisibility is where it’s at these days.

What dps spell do you use least for your class and why?
Can’t remember the last time I used Ice Lance unless it was slaughtering low level mobs in Darkshore while working on that last bit of Darnassus reputation.  It’s great for stomping Totems on Faction Champions in Crusaders’ Coliseum, but that’s not my job.  If Frost were ever a viable raid spec again, that would change of course.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your dps class and why?
Well unlike a certain asshat developer seems to think, we’re not the unparralelled gods of aoe that we were supposed to be.   But Arcane mages have awesome burst dps potential.  If you need something dead right now, nothing beats popping a trinket with Arcane Power and Icy Veins up and then spamming a 4xArcane Blast stack.  With 40% threat reduction on arcane spells I can usually survive it, too.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your dps class and why?
We’re still not very good at dpsing on the move, although as Arcane we’re better than most.  It’s not really much of a weakness, we still have a few tricks up our sleeve and we’re probably the most mobile of the dps caster classes.  Nothing much to complain about, really.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best dps assignment for you?
Stick me on the boss and watch the sparks fly.  Although when you do need to assign some dps to the unglamourous kiting tasks, we’re probably best suited for it.   Our dps suffers, but a shadow priest doing the same job would be 90% useless.

Rawr!

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with most and why?
Gimme more elemental shamans!  They can have my Focus Magic anytime!  Totem of Wrath and a guaranteed crit every 8 seconds makes me a very happy mage when I’m specced Fire!  A Demonology warlock with Demonic Pact and Curse of Elements wins when I’m Arcane.

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with least and why?
Any melee except Retribution Paladins.  I at least get a nice 3% damage buff from being under their Auras, but Feral Druids, Warriors and Rogues do nothing for me.  Deathknights with Ebon Plaguebringer can be fun too.

What is your worst habit as a dps?
Situational Awareness.  Hard Mode Hodir is my worst nightmare, far too many things going on for me to get my head around.  We have a Warlock who can easily do 14k dps on that fight by getting every buff available.  I have trouble going over 8k.  Just too much going on for me to process.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while dpsing?
Selfish bastard dps classes who only care about their own position on damage meters even at the cost of a wipe.  People who continue to dps Gormok the Impaler when snobolds are up.  People who won’t decurse because it means less time doing dps.  And then the shallow morons who make snide remarks about Recount afterwards without checking who did the spellstealing/decursing/crowd control, or who attacked what, not just who attacked the  most.  Really pisses me right off.  “Oh, Calli didn’t do as much dps as <player name>.”  Right, but the dps Calli did was at least on the correct fucking target, dickhead.  Check that on Recount!

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other dps?
I do.  It took a long, long time to get there, but mages are in a good spot right now.  We spent an entire expansion being completely and utterly shit.  I don’t look back on The Burning Crusade with any kind of nostalgia, it was a terrible time to be anything other than a Warlock or a Shadow Priest if you were a caster.  But Wrath is a great Expansion for us.  In TBC you could do great dps as a mage, provided your entire group was set up to do nothing but buff and support you, and it wasn’t worth the effort when you could just hire a shadow priest and get half a dozen warlocks to faceroll their shadowbolt key for more return on your investment.  Thankfully those days are long gone.  When 10 out of 10 of the best raid guilds in the world said that mages were the biggest waste of a raid slot in TBC, you can only cry quietly and hope things get better in the next expansion.  And they did.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a dps’er?
Recount and World of Logs.  I’m just recently getting to know how to properly use Recount to analyse what I did and why I should be doing anything different, but it’s a great tool as long as it’s not used to spam raid chat by the moron Rogue who stood in Fire behind Koralon for 15 seconds, but did awseome dps before he died.  World of Logs is also an excellent tool, and you can run it Live to check performance while raiding.  I highly recommend it.

You want the gnome? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE GNOME!

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
Well I was once asked if I could summon someone to Stormwind.  Yes, it was a Night Elf Hunter.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new dpsers of your class to learn?
Ask me this a year or two ago and I would have said threat control.  It’s still possible to overaggro as a mage these days if you’re a complete idiot and your tank is new to the job or just incompetent.  Heck, you can overaggro even with the best tank, but you have to be a special kind of overgeared and stupid to do that these days.

What dps class do you feel you understand least?
Rogues.  I’m not terrible on my Rogue, but I should be far better.  Again, it’s a situational awareness thing, there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of if you want to do good dps as a Rogue.  Any idiot can do mediocre dps as a Rogue, most of us can do decent dps, but doing great dps as a Rogue is hard damn work!

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in dps?
Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text is very useful to remind me what procs I need to use before they fade.  Scorchio is invaluable for tracking things like Hot Streak, Polymorph, Arcane Blast stacks and Missile Barrage procs.  I used to use Clique for crowd controlling focus targets but that’s built into Blizzards’ default UI now (if you enable it).  Still use Clique for healing, but that’s a whole different questionairre.

What stat to stack, and why?
That used to be a simple question to answer, stack spellpower until your ears bleed.  Things changed in Wrath.  Generally you won’t go wrong stacking spellpower anyway, but the value of one stat changes in relation to how much of other stats you need.  At its most basic, hit rating is very valuable right up until you reach the hit cap, at which point more becomes totally worthless.  Understanding the relationship between your current spellpower, haste and crit ratings is far more complex.  The best advice I can give anyone is to use the wonderful Theorycraft-o-matic by Lhivera, Zaldinar and Zxile.  I plug myself in there, tell it what spec I am and see straight away that further hit rating is worthless, haste is worth the most, closely followed by spellpower, both of which are worth twice as much to me as any more crit.  It’s a great tool and I urge mages everywhere to use it.

My, you're a tall one!

As the more alert amongst you may have spotted already, the paid race change service that everyone and their tennis partner said would never happen… happened.  And I finally got to realise a long-held ambition…

CALLI IS A GNOME!

Let’s just count the good points.

1.  She’s a Gnome!
2.  5% more intellect, that’s 29,500 mana self buffed, friends and neighbours!  She’s one helluva smart gnome!
3.  She’s as cute as a button!
4.  Reaching your keys under the sofa has never been easier.
5.  Smaller target!
6.  Extra humiliation factor when she slaughters horde Tauren!
7.  She’s a Gnome!
8.  Groovy dance!
9.  Squeaks when hit in combat!

And now the bad points.

1.  No more human racials, might actually have to get a pvp trinket now.
2.  There is no 2!

Gnomegeddon, you better watch out, Larissa’s got competion now!

While we’re on the subject of race changes, Galadan’s had a complete makeover too.

Get yer coat, you've pulled.

Now there’s a fine figure of a Dwarf if ever you saw one.  The changes are more than skin deep, however.  Galadan has also changed spec.  After being Holy for five years, I finally gave up trying to heal 5 man instances on him effectively.  He’s a great Main Tank healer, but in any instance where the entire group takes damage at the same time, which is like, every frikkin’ instance in the game, trying to keep everyone alive was making him so stressed his hair fell out.  So Galadan has crossed to the Dark Side and is now lolret.  Or is that retlol?  And should it be capitalised?  I can never remember.

You may recall this post where Galadan dabbled briefly in the waters of Retribution Cove and Protection Bay, before hastily retreating to the calm and serene safety of Holy Valley.  Well that was before Wrath of the Lich King and the big changes to Retribution.  And let me tell you, Retribution is actually more interesting than watching paint dry now.  You can still pop a Seal, Judge, autoattack and go make some coffee while you wait for the bad guy to die, but that’s so 2005, darlings.  Yes, I know, late to the party again, so sue me.  I missed the Retribution train when it boarded at LOL Central early in Wrath, but that means I also missed the “To the ground, baby!” phase, and now that Ret seems to be nicely settled I thought rather than just retire Galadan completely until Paladin healing in 5 mans wasn’t so stressful, I’d have a go at Retribution.

And it rocks.

The best part is, in Wintergrasp, thanks to the utter carnage that Ret Pallies wreaked early in Wrath and despite my being completely inept where pvp is concerned, people see a ginger-bearded Dwarf Paladin with a massive two-hander running towards them,  screaming incoherently at the top of his lungs and they… run away.  Try it yourself, it’s hilarious.

Pirates > Ninjas
It’s been another interesting week.  Sithica got to see Trial of the Crusader 10 man as a tank in a random PuG.  Yes, a PuG.  I’m still getting used to the idea of people doing Pickup Groups to the latest raid content and beating it, my Vanilla WoW heritage is showing.  I guess it’s true that 10 man ToC really isn’t anything to be scared of these days with the multitide of options available to people to gear up their characters.  Heck, Sithica went in there with the Tier 8.5 tank chest and Tier 9 tank shoulders and the last time she was in a raid was when Naxx 25 was still considered mildly challenging!  Anyway, ToC10 – not scary if you know your stuff and are geared even slightly appropriately.   But I digress, the raid group itself was pretty competent and the bosses dropped quite nicely despite my going into spanner mode on Twin Valkyr and forgetting to switch into Frost Presence.  I apologised profusely to the healers and they were fine with it, everyone had a laugh at my expense, it was that kind of group.

However.

We’ve all read stories of Ninja Master Looters.  I’ve seen warnings about certain individuals spammed in the trade channels, as I’m sure you all have.  In five years of playing I’ve never actually encountered it myself, until this ToC10 raid.  What actually happened was that Binding Light dropped from Faction Champions and the Raid Leader invited anyone interested to roll on it.  Note, that’s anyone interested.  The usual protocol on Hellscream EU is that you roll for the spec you’re raiding with first, if no-one wants the loot for main spec, offspec rolls are invited.  I’m absolutely fine with that, even if it means I never get any dps gear on my tanks, since they’re always, you know..  tanking.  But heck, that’s what badges are for.  Anyway, the point is that on this raid, anyone could roll on anything they could use.  Great.  Now my Deathknight isn’t interested in any healing trinket, obviously, but the Holy Paladin was, so he rolled and won.

Then the raid leader, a Resto Druid decides that it’s not a very good trinket for a Holy Paladin and since he “really really needed it” he took it for himself.

Whoah!  Hold on there, cowboy!  There was a minute of “Uh, didn’t the paladin win the roll?” type of comment but as the paladin, strangely enough, didn’t seem that bothered, everyone let it go and the raid continued.

Er..  www.wtf.com?  Alarm bells were very definitely now ringing.  I wanted to say something but you don’t want to be the lone voice of dissent when even the injured party doesn’t care about it, so I held my tongue and we continued.  Then we down Twin Valkyr and lo and behold, Reckoning drops.  The Hunter in the group immediately started jumping cartwheels, as well he should, it’s an amazing two-hander for a hunter.  It’s also significantly better than Sithica’s current two-hand dps weapon, even if the stats aren’t perfect for a Deathknight, they’re still pretty damn good for her Blood dps offspec, and so this being a raid where you can roll on any useful loot and “anyone can get loot if they win a fair roll” I roll on it too, as does the Retribution paladin and the Warrior Tank.  And I win the roll.  And all hell breaks loose.

“That’s not a tank weapon!”
“Well spotted, I don’t intend to use it for tanking.”
“It’s useless for a Deathknight!”
“You don’t play a Deathknight much, do you?”
“It’s better for the hunter, they need agility and you need strength!”
“Yes it is better for him but it’s not useless for me and he didn’t win the roll.”

And then the raid leader gives it to the Retribution paladin.  Who just happened to be his guildmate.  And who rolled lower than the hunter.  Apparently, Blood Deathknights don’t get any benefit from Agility but Retribution Paladins do.  Well I’d have been okay to pass the weapon to the Hunter because it’s clearly better itemised for him and nowhere near as big an upgrade for me as it was for him, but the Ret Pally?  No fucking way, José!  What rankled most was that this was clearly the kind of raid where you were only getting a drop if it wasn’t any use to the Leader and his cronies.  So since I had no desire to see myself screwed out of any tank loot because the Leader “really really needed it” for his Bear offspec or his Warrior mate, I left the raid and hearthed out.  Life’s too short to waste it with arguments over pixels, but my time is not there to be used to twink someone else’s mates.  Sorry, and bye.  The most bizarre thing about it all was except for the loot drama, they’d all been really nice raiders.  The mind boggles.

It doesn’t end there, of course.  I can’t get anything meaningful done for the next ten minutes as the Raid Leader and all his guildmates spam me with whispers either begging me to come back and tank the last boss or calling me a noob, ninja and loot whore.  Yes, apparently, I get screwed out of a winning loot roll because the Master Looters’ mate wants it, and that makes me a ninja.  Go figure.  So I switch to Calli for some peace and quiet and spend some time doing cooking dailies and working the Auction House.

An hour later, they’re still in /trade, looking for a tank for last boss ToC10.  I know I shouldn’t be laughing, but I’m mean, petty and vindictive like that.  Felt sorry for that hunter, though.

Twink My Alt
So it’s been ups and downs in ToC10 this week.  The call went out for any dps spare for a ToC10 consisting of the alts of players in our servers’ top raiding guild.  Two of our guys, including The Mighty Jingles, join the group to round out the numbers.  The group’s being led by the hunter alt of one of the other guild’s top warriors.  He’s known to have a “bit of an ego” but when you’re at the cutting edge of raid progression on a server you have something to brag about, and he’s never done me any harm so I tend to ignore any malicious gossip.  He, and the rest of his guild, all know their stuff, so this should be a cakewalk.

Oh dear.

Northrend Beasts was painful.  I mean it was just embarrassing.  Myself and the other rogue alt of one of our officers accounted for 75% of all damage to the snobolds on that fight.  Let me just stress, rogue alt.  Melee dps.  Melee dps who should have been stabbing Gormok in the ass while the ranged dps killed the snobolds.  But since The Mighty Jingles was the only ranged dps who seemed to be even aware of what snobolds were, he was forced to do something about it.

Three wipes in and still no bosses dead, I looked at the leaders’ gear, since he was being about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike as far as dps was concerned.  He only had a couple of blues, but the rest weren’t purple.  He was doing ToC10 in greens and quest rewards.  We decided at that point that discretion was the better form of valour, made our excuses and left.  I have no interest in running up a repair bill just so I can play “twink the alt” of someone who should really know better.

But this is not a failpug post!  After what feels like years of dutifully cracking open an Oracle egg every week, something great finally hatched!

I just wish protodrakes weren’t so damn ugly!

And just to prove that not all Trial of the Crusader groups suck, Calli earned a couple of new achievements over the course of the last two weeks.

You can’t win them all, but you can win the ones that matter.  Anything else is just life experience.

Faction Champions in Crusaders’ Coliseum gets a lot of bad press.  It’s essntially the Priestess Delrissa fight from Magisters’ Terrace, except on crack.  Are you “late to the party” guy and never did Magisters’ Terrace at level 70?  Okay, here’s how it goes.

Right after you defeat Lord Jarraxus, your opposing faction leader (Garrosh Hellscream in my case) starts acting like a spoiled brat who’s had his candy taken away and demands the raid should be forced to face his champions in the next encounter.  Tirion Fordring agrees to allow it if he’ll just stop being such an emo crybaby and shut the hell up.  And so you end up facing what is basically an Arena team of opposing faction players.  Except they’re not.

All flippancy aside, it’s pretty important that you remember this is not really a pvp fight.  This is where the majority of the crying about Faction Champions arises, and I was just as guilty as everyone else when I first had to do the fight.  See, I suck at pvp.  I mean, I really suck at pvp.  If being bad at pvp was a sport, I could represent my country at it.  So I read the patch notes about how you’d have to face a number of classes of any spec and how pvp diminishing returns on crowd control was in force.  Then I played the encounter and cried as my polymorph was dispelled by the opposing Priests, my fireballs were eaten by the Shamans’ grounding totems,  the Paladins bubbled and healed up when we got down to 15% and I got melee- trained and insta-gibbed by the Rogue and Arms Warrior.

Oh noes, Blizz am making me pvp in my pve contents! QQ!!

Well, no they’re not.  All they’re doing is making you think outside of your nice comfortable kill-the-raid-boss mindset.  This is not actually a bad thing.  Allow me to elaborate.

Yes, Faction Champions, in any flavour, is a lot like a pvp fight.  As already stated you have diminishing returns on all forms of crowd control, so your first polymorph will last a maximum of 10 seconds, then less each consecutive time you cast it on the same target until they very quickly become immune.  In practice, this is not an issue anyway, since the opposing priests and paladins dispel it as quickly as you apply it.  In that respect it’s exactly like a pvp fight, but there are differences and the differences are huge.

For a start, they’re all tauntable.  In the past this shared diminishing returns too, but that’s been removed in the latest build.  Taunting them doesn’t guarantee you aggro for ever, but once every 8 seconds you can get them to forget who they’re wailing on for a moment or two, so it’s nothing like pvp in that respect.  Next, all of your “oh shit” pve buttons work just fine, even if you don’t get the full duration out of them.  Fade will drop aggro, as will Mirror Image, Vanish, Feign Death, Invisibility and any other number of class skills.  You might get aggro back a few seconds later, but it gives you time to be somewhere else.  One other major difference that pissed me off immensely was that Counterspell’s magic school lockdown doesn’t work.  This may actually be the same in real pvp, I don’t know since I don’t do it.  But the sweet thing about Counterspell is that while it has the longest cooldown of any spell interrupt (24 seconds, fact fans) it has the sweetest side effect.   It locks out all spells from the same school as the interrupted spell for 8 seconds.  Imagine a Holy Paladin with their Holy spells shut down for 8 whole seconds.  You do not want to be that Holy Paladin.  Well sadly, in the Faction Champions fight, all Counterspell does is work as any other interrupt, except it’s on a 24 second cooldown.  Meh!

The one thing that Faction Champions does share with a pvp or Arena fight is that personal survivability is your problem, not your healers.  Faction Champions is the Olympic Medal Not Standing In The Fire contest.  You could have 2 tanks, 22 healers and you in the raid, and if you’re going to stand there looking pretty and continuing your nuke rotations when the melee train switches to you, you’re going to die anyway.  No healer will be able to keep your squishy butt in one piece if the Warrior/Rogue/Deathknight/Enhance Shaman/Ret Pally suddenly take an intimate interest in it.  Surviving is up to YOU.   Check Recount after one of your Champions wipes and look at the damage done to you.  I guarantee you that the opposing Mage, Shadow Priest and Warlock will all be doing far more damage than the melee classes combined.  But this damage is coming in relatively small chunks, it’s entirely manageable.  This is damage your healers can handle, whether that be through dispels or heals.  No-one should be dying from damage sustained from any of the casters unless you were low on health anyway from being battered by a melee class, and if that’s the case it was your own fault anyway.  Now look at the number of deaths on recount and see who got the killing blows.

Yep, the casters are doing the most damage, but the melee dps are the ones who are actually killing people.  If you just stand there while that Arms Warrior smacks you upside the head with a 15k Mortal Strike, you deserve to die.  And you will.  This is where we all need to get out of our nice comfortable raiders’ mindset and start thinking like an Arena team.  And I was quite frankly amazed at the number of tools I, even as a raid-specced Fire Mage, had to keep my squishy butt from getting…  well..  squished.  Let’s go through the numbers.

Ice Block.  Our old favourite.  Except in this fight, the Arms Warrior will remove it with Shattering Throw and the priests will Mass Dispel it.  Ice Block is your tool of last resort, never the first.

Mirror Image.  I want to marry this spell and have its babies.  Every mage, regardless of spec should be casting this as the fight starts, because the aggro drop works and it gives the Champions three other targets to choose from.  There’s a very good chance that if you start the fight with this spell you’ll have 30 uninterrupted seconds of pew pew on your focus target, and if he’s not dead in that time your raid failed, not you.  Note that the Mirror Images can be the focus of the Champions’ aggro, and this is a Good Thing.  Standing next to them when the Arms Warrior Bladestorms through them is a Bad Thing.  Cast it, move aside, begin the pew pew.

Frost Nova.  Another awesome spell that’s saved my ass more times than I care to remember on this fight, but as ever it’s highly situational.  Never use it when the Arms Warrior has Bladestorm up or the Rogue has Cloak of Shadows, all you succeed in doing is wasting a global cooldown and forcing yourself to wait to cast the Blink you should have cast.  Also, as in any pve situation, never, ever, ever cast Frost Nova when the mob you’re escaping from is standing next to anyone else, especially a healer.  All you’ll succeed in doing is forcing the mob to switch aggro to the closest target that they can hit, and insta-gibbing them.

Did we mention Blink?  If you have a Hunter on your team they should be laying a Frost Trap in the middle of the arena at all times.  Blink into it.  Even if the mob maintains aggro and follows you through the Blink, he’s going to run right into the Frost Trap and isn’t going to catch you in a hurry.  In that time, a tank can and should have taunted him off you anyway.  Try to save Blink for when the mob focussing you has immunity effects up and can’t be crowd controlled easily.

Invisibility.  Because it has such a long cooldown and takes so long (untalented) to activate, Invisibility is ideally used in one of two situations.  Either when everything else is on cooldown and the melee train is running for you or when it’s a wipe and you want to save yourself some repair bills.  Note that to get the most out of invisibility you should ideally be standing in the area of effect of your Hunters’ Frost Trap.  This makes the most of the few seconds it takes for Invisibility to kick in, just in case the enemy Rogue is trying to introduce you to the business end of Mister Pointy.

Polymorph.  As a crowd control effect this is almost useless in this fight, at least at the early stages.  If it lasts longer than 2 seconds before it gets grounded, dispelled or purged then you’re not playing the same fight I am.  However when all else is lost, you’re got a few seconds to spare and there’s an angry Arms Warrior bearing down on you, Polymorph can save your ass and give you time to run and your tanks time to taunt.  Bear in mind it will have no effect on a Bladestorming Arms Warrior.  Blink is always your friend in this case.

Slow.  Arcane mages only, this one.  But it’s a beauty.  If you have it, you’ll most likely be assigned to keep it up on one of the melee targets anyway, but since it’ll be getting dispelled quite often it isn’t going to make much difference if you use it to keep your ass alive and out of reach of the Retribution Paladin who’s chasing you down.  If it keeps you alive long enough for him to lose interest, it served its purpose.

Run Away.  Simple but highly effective, especially if your side have a Frost Trap or Earthbind Totem in play.

Note that all of these tricks aren’t going to be much use to you if the first indication you have that the melee train is arriving at You Station is when you start taking 15k Mortal Strikes.  The idea is to be reacting before you start getting beaten on and that can be handled in a couple of ways.

1.  Use Teamspeak/Ventrilo.  Have your two “tanks” enable Target of Target so they can see who their target is switching to and have them call it out.

2.  Use some sort of addon that alerts you when you have aggro.  I use X-Perl and it handles this as well as an incredible number of other things.  Very little grabs your attention like the word “AGGRO” across the middle of your screen as a PVE raider.  In most raids it’s usually the last thing you see before you die.  On Faction Champions it’s your cue to start getting creative.

3.  Pvp a lot.  There’s no better way to hone your sense of situational awareness.  On the plus side you’ll become a lot better at staying off the radar and at target switching if you take part in any kind of competent Arena play. 

Alternatively you could just do Faction Champions three or four times a week.  You’ll either get good at it or you’ll eat a lot of dirt.  As a Mage you’ve got a massive number of tricks up your sleeve to stay alive and continue doing damage that other classes would kill for.  Any Mage who dies early on in this fight simply wasn’t paying enough attention.  Dying in Faction Champions is always your problem, not your healers.

One of the Hunters in our 25 man raid is a Dwarf named Rui.  He’s a good hunter, solid dps, doesn’t make a habit of standing in the Fire, never pulls aggro… in short, nothing like the guys who are the first to get squished by Vault of Archavon bosses when you’re bored and PuG it late on a Wednesday night.  Anyone who runs with a regular raid knows that there are always “characters” in those raids.  For example, we have an excellent healing paladin named Tinuviel, but she’s pretty much known as Afkviel for reasons that I hope are obvious from the nickname.  Rui is the guy who always disconnects.  His connection sucks harder than an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.  I think Hoover is his ISP or something.  It’s become something of a joke over time.

“Everyone buffed?”
“Yep.”
“Tanks ready?”
“Ready to go.”
“Rui disconnected yet?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, let’s get this show on the road, pulling in three…”

Well let me tell you, since patch 3.2.2, I’ve been Rui, and it’s not as funny in the flesh as it is from a distance.  For years, I’ve been the guy with the connection made from solid granite.  Never miss a raid, never go offline, always there.  After patch 3.2.2 rolled out, every time Gormok the Impaler so much as looks at me in a funny way, I get dumped out to the login screen and cannot reconnect as long as the fight is going on.  And then it takes 15 attempts to connect to a character in Dalaran.  And so it goes on.

Yesterday the daily cooking quest was Rhino Dogs and the daily fishing quest was the Ghostfish, both conveniently located in Sholozar Basin.  So I hearthed to Nesingwary Basecamp, flew over to Rainspeaker Canopy to pick up this weeks’ Oracle egg and went fishing.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m pretty sure that your fishing bobber shouldn’t time out before you can see the fishing channeling bar appear.  And I’m also relatively certain that casting a line isn’t supposed to take fifteen seconds.  On a similar note, as a level 80 mage covered in 10 man Heroic and 25 man Crusader Coliseum gear with an average item level of 240, I shouldn’t be dying from the bleed of a level 76 non elite Rhino’s gore effect in the time it takes for me to get an Arcane Blast off.

There are (at latest time of checking) 32 pages of complaints on the US forums and 10 pages (in the busiest thread) on the EU forums about the instant disconnects people are suffering from Crusader Coliseum and the associated lag that plagues you afterwards.  There are no Blue solutions, but the cures suggested by the community range from clearing your dns cache (whatever the hell that is) to sacrificing a virgin to the Blood God at the next full moon.  Personally, I’ve tried everything bar reinstalling Warcraft, which is something I’m not going to do because the only difference between having a rock solid connection and one made of swiss cheese and spaghetti is that patch 3.2.2 rolled out.  And I’d not be exaggerating if I were to say I’m not best pleased with the state of affairs.

But the suckage doesn’t end there.  Usually, after being online for three hours or so, my latency will drop from 4500ms to something approaching playable and I can think about getting into a group to do something useful.  Last night we threw together an Onyxia raid for alts, and I came along to tank on my warrior, Gorn.  Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but when the raid leader says “Gorn, you tank the boss, I’ll tank the adds”, I take that to mean that the raid leader is going to tank the adds.  I don’t take it to mean that I’m going to tank the boss, help him tank the whelps, tank the elite adds when they show and hope he’s not busy admiring his nails and is quick with a taunt when the last elite is up and the boss lands at the other end of the fucking instance, because apparently, that’s exactly what “You tank the boss, I tank the adds” does, in fact, mean.  Sadly, since my balls are made of flesh rather than Madame Eva’s finest crystal, I obviously interpreted the instructions the wrong way.  Silly me.  Entirely my fault obviously.

Well, we got her down on the second attempt and at least I got a new hat out of it.

Guess who arrived in the mail yesterday?

Squeeeee!

The best part is you get one mailed to every character on the eligible account!  As well as occasionally blasting the air with railgun fire and firing off the odd rocket propelled grenade every now and then, he also responds to mouse clicks with the customary cute baby murloc gargle, except filtered through a radio link.  Awesome!

I will love him and keep him and call him..  er..  well..   Grunty.

So I’m on Sithica the deathtard, grinding out those Badges of Triumph for a better pair of tanking shoulders than the ones she picked up in Naxx10 an absolute age ago, and I end up in yet another PuG.  Not sure why I keep doing this to myself, but I guess if I didn’t I’d have nothing to write about.  Aaaaaanyway…  it’s a pretty good group, but I seem to be having threat problems, as in, I can’t seem to generate enough of it.

I’m aware that we lolknights got something of a beating with the nerfbat a short while back, but while I have noticed my Frost Strikes and Howling Blasts hitting for a lot less lately than I’m used to, holding aggro never used to be this hard.  What am I doing wrong?  The problem is this PuG warlock.  Tórment is his name.  It’s only heroic Gundrak, but my usual tactic of dropping Death and Decay (glyphed) spreading the disease love around and Howling Blasting the bejesus out of everything just isn’t working, and this poor lock is taking a beating.  Eventually even repeated Dark Commands can’t get the aggro off him (or the healer gives up trying to heal both of us at the same time) and he dies.  I feel like a total jerk.  It’s possible he wasn’t bothering to take the marked target and start his nukes on that, but I just can’t be sure.  Either way, a dps died on my watch and I take that personally.  Or at least I did, until he mutters the immortal words:

lern2tank, noob

Okay, now the fastest way to push my buttons is to use l337speak in front of me and mean it, and this guy lit up every button I have with that one remark.  All sense of guilt and pity evaporated at that point.  Sure, it may still have been my crappy tanking that got him killed rather than a complete disregard for marked targets and a complete inability to throttle his own threat in the pursuit of that all-important number 1 spot on recount, but now he can just go take a very long jump off the end of a very short pier.  His cards are well and truly marked.

If you have a problem with my tanking, aggro-monkey, you’re entirely welcome to find another tank.

… I replied, and believe me, I was more than prepared to leave the group and let them find a competent tank, since I had half convinced myself it was actually my fault.  But the healer quickly stepped in and assured me that my tanking was fine, please continue, etc.  And on the very next pull, the warlock did it again, only this time I just knew he was trying to prove a point.

So I let him die.

Yep, didn’t even attempt to taunt the mobs that were eating his face.  Wisely, the healer didn’t even attempt to keep him alive, either, so I didn’t have any healer aggro to worry about.  Once the lock died, and he died very, very fast, the rest of the pull went like clockwork.

Keep it up, I guarantee you’ll get sick of it before I do.

I told him.  He behaved himself after that.  Didn’t utter another word.  Well a few hours later I’m on my warrior, Gorn, in a Vault of Archavon 25 man PuG as dps.  I’m still feeling some residual guilt about the warlock from the earlier PuG as I’m not totally convinced the aggro issues were totally his fault, but… got to keep your mind on the matter at hand.  We’re squared off against Koralon, the Main Tank has just given a ready check and started the pull countdown.  Then a number of things happen.

1.  The boss suddenly bursts into flames
2.  I see a Chaos Bolt streak out of nowhere and slam into him as he lunges forward
3.  The health bar of one of the warlocks suddenly goes from 100% to 0% in one shot
4.  The Tank manages a quick “wtf?” just as two healers get eaten.
5.  We wipe.
6.  A warlock is very quickly kicked out of the raid.

I wonder if you can guess what his name was?

But the PuG rollercoaster doesn’t end there.  Brewfest is upon us!  And that means more loot, and beer, but mostly more loot.  So I’ve run Blackrock Depths to kill Coren Direbrew a couple of times, and now I’m on Shinano in another PuG to do it again.  We have a loladin named Baro with us.  As each person joins the group, the leader asks if they can summon the boss.  Baro has to be asked five times before he grudgingly answers with “y”.

I know you think you know where this is going, but it’s much more entertaining than that, trust me.

So we get to the Grim Guzzler and I say I’ll start it off first.  I start it up and Direbrew begins the fight with his usual “You’ll pay for that, Druid!” or whatever it is he says.  We kill him, loot him, wait for him to respawn, and repeat.  Three times.

Of course Baro has already done it, several times as it turns out later, and he can’t summon the boss at all.  But Baro is different from your usual instance ninja dickhead, he has at least some sense of shame, because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s the one who’s screwed the rest of us out of a chance at the boss.  So when asked if he’d started it off yet he claims he did it first.

Er..  no you didn’t, I did.

I say.  To which his defence is:

Omg Shinano is a ninja shes trying to screw us all she didnt summon boss yet!

I am very happy to report that while he continued in this vein for quite some time, the rest of the group were slightly more intelligent than he hoped they were.  Or more intelligent than him anyway, which amounts to the same thing.  You see, when you start the encounter, the boss refers to you in chat by your class.  And while Baro was accusing me of being a ninja, raping babies and starting the Chicago fire, they were all scrolling up to check the chat log.

Busted!

I later found out in general chat that not only had he pulled this stunt at least twice before, he’d also led one group where he’d enabled master looter and ninja’d a drop or two.  So, one more time, just in case you missed it, name Baro, class Paladin, server Hellscream EU.

I’m just planting seeds, never know where they’ll take root.

They say “be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”  If I asked for a show of hands from everyone who wished that the Old World zones looked half as polished as the Burning Crusade or Lich King zones, there’d probably be an awful lot of hands on display.  I love Nagrand and Zangarmarsh, although I accept that the bluesey Zangarmarsh isn’t to everyone’s taste, but to this day the view as you fly from Terrokar to Zangarmarsh at sunset is one of the prettiest views in game I can recall.  There’s a split second as you round the corner of the bluff outside Shattrath City and just as the light changes…  there.  Awesome.  Nagrand is like a grown up Mulgore, which is itself probably the prettiest of the Old World zones in my opinion.  Then we have Sholozar Basin in Northrend, which has a level of detail I sorely wished could be lavished on one of my other favourite Old World zones, Stranglethorn Vale.

Another ever popular request is that we should be able to use our flying mounts in the Old World too.  Again, this is predictably popular, but just not possible at the moment due to the way the Old World was built.  Blizzard employed a lot of clever tricks with forced perspective and false horizons to make Azeroth look bigger and deeper than it really is, and being able to fly around it would destroy the illusion.  Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms were just never designed to be seen from the air, except on very carefully staged flight paths.

Well, we’re getting what we asked for.  We’re going to be able to fly around the Old World and it’s getting the graphical makeover we’ve seen given to Northrend and Outland.  There’s just one slight fly in the ointment.

It’s not going to be the Old World we all know anymore.

Times, They Are A Changing
The thing is, and the clue’s in the title, Cataclysm brings with it…  well..  cataclysmic changes to the Old World I know and love.  Oh I’m sure Blizzard are going to do it all with their customary style and polish, and I’m equally sure that the new zones and new versions of the old zones are going to look suitably amazing.  But I’m going to miss those old zones.  I’m not sure at this point exactly what the full list of zone makeovers are, but stop and think for a second.  We’ve all had one of those “ooooh” moments at some point or another, whether it be waiting for the zeppellin at Thunder Bluff at Sunset, fishing off the lighthouse in Westfall, waiting for the boat at Menethil Harbour or whatever, when the camera angle and the light are just right, and it suddenly hits us what an incredibly good-looking game Blizzard have created.  Well come the expansion, that special place may not be there anymore.

And with the speed that people zip through levels on the route to 80 these days there are HUGE tracts of land that a lot of people have just never seen, and they’re never going to get the chance to see them unless they get out and sniff the daisies now, before it’s too late.  Sure, they’re going to be replaced with something bigger, shinier and more impressive, but the original landscape won’t be there anymore!

There has simply never been a better time to go out and get that World Explorer achievement.  Heck, Brann Bronzebeard will even throw in a shiny new tabard for you if you do it.  So go on, you really owe it to yourself to go out and see what an amazing world Blizzard created before it gets changed completely.

Just to start you off, I went out and captured some of it for you.

Mulgore, simply breathtaking

The Barrens at Sunset

Thousand Needles

The Lariss Pavilion in Ferelas

Dire Maul

Shadowprey Village, Desolace

Stonetalon Mountains

Ashenvale Forest

This is a very proud moment for me.  I have a troll of my very own!  Not a particularly intelligent one, but when you’ve been blogging for over a year and your 300+ commenters are amongst the nicest of folks around, you can’t afford to be fussy.  Sure, my troll doesn’t appear to be smart enough to know how the Warcraft Armoury works and his spelling and grammar are the usual troll standard, but he’s MY troll dammit so leave him alone!

The thing that seems to have provoked my Troll’s ire is Jingles’ Even Bigger Adventure, which is a bit wierd since it’s hardly the most controversial topic I ever posted.  But heck, who can say what attracts the Trolls when the official forums are having a slow day.
Speaking of which, I can’t just keep calling him “my Troll”.  He may become a regular visitor and will therefore deserve a name!  I’d call him George but that may just be bit too Steinbeckian.

Bah!  I’ll think of something.

Moving On Swiftly

Yes, all the big news is about Cataclysm, I know, but meh..  it’s a year away and I have more important things to discuss.

Askara is growing up!  My little spacegoat shaman is 77 at the time of posting and is having the usual trials and tribulations getting groups for normal instances in order to acquire teh phat lewtz while levelling.  Unlike with Sithica, I’ve not twinked Askara at all, no Bind on Account Heirloom items, no expensive enchants, no donations from the Royal Bank of Calli.  Everything she’s carrying she earned with the sweat of her own brow, and you know what?  It’s still just as easy and quick to level without the expensive stuff as it is with.  You know what else?  While running Sithica through the Armoury to generate the link to her name, above, I discovered that on the whole WoW-Europe armoury there’s only ONE other character called Sithica.  So if you’re that level 10 Night Elf warrior on the Frostwhisper server, congratulations, you almost have the honour of having a completely unique name!

The PuGs have been the usual mix.  I got Askara into a Violet Hold PuG a few days ago as the healer, she’s dual-specced Enhance/Resto but her healing gear isn’t amazing.  Not that it really matters, but when I saw the tank was going to be a level 73 gnome warrior and the dps were all ranged from level 75 to 78, I really started to get a very bad feeling.  As it turned out, things got a bit surreal.  It’s wasn’t the smoothest run at all, in fact it ended in tears without a single boss downed, but the way it all panned out was totally bizarre.

First of all, the tank was amazing.  This blew my mind.  He took a beating, as you’d expect for a tank of his level, but he paid attention to healer mana, kept mobs off me and even took the time to taunt mobs off the overenthusiastic Mage without getting pissed off.  Our first boss was Zuramat the Obliterator and naturally, the only people who knew you had to kill (and how to kill) the Void Sentries were the tank and the healer, and we kind of had our hands full, you know…  tanking and healing.  No big deal, we ran back, briefed everyone on what needed doing and tried again.  Round Two was better, but not good enough.  At this point, the Mage spoke up, he’d noticed something odd about the level 76 Warlock.

Mage: “Dude, how much spellpower do you have?”
Warlock: “315.”
Everyone: “Huh?  Are you serious?”
Warlock: “How much do you have?”
Mage: “1300..  you only have 315?”
Warlock: “How you get so much spellpower??!!!??!”
Me: “You might find using your Fel Armour helps with that.”
Mage: “Kick the lock or I leave.”

Ok, it’s hard to find technical fault with the Mage here.  Nothing we could do in the space of warming up to take another shot was going to turn this newbie warlock into a dps superstar, but he didn’t have to be such a dick about it.  I don’t care how much you suck as long as you’re prepared to listen to advice about how not to suck, and the Warlock pretty clearly was keen to learn.  True, he was never going to be able to pull his weight in time to make any difference in that particular group, and we were pretty much doomed to failure, but there’s no need to go and make someone feel miserable just because they don’t have intimate knowledge of how to play their class in a levelling instance where the loot drops don’t matter because you’ll be dropping them for something better in two days.  Sure, call it quits if you know the group’s going nowhere fast, but that’s a human being on the other end of that Warlock, don’t be a dick just because you can.

Needless to say the mage just vented some more scorn on the poor Lock and left the group, so we called it after the tank and I’d spent a few minutes giving the Warlock some tips on how to improve his game which was very gratefully received.

Guru of Drakkuru
I had a totally different PuG experience later, after being asked to dps in a group for Drak’tharon Keep (more trolls, see what I did there?).  On the surface, this looked like being a much better group.  We had a level 80 Deathknight as the tank, a level 76 Paladin healer who was covered in Heirloom gear from head to foot, a hunter who was so anonymous I had trouble even remembering that he was a hunter and a level 73 Feral druid.

The tank was appalling.  Really, really, bad.  I’m not going to be too harsh since I give props to any Deathknight who’s willing to put aside the loldps for half an hour and try to do something different with their class; and he was at least willing to give it a go, but if he hadn’t significantly out-levelled the instance we’d have been in deep, deep shit because you could pull aggro off him with a wet towel.  But like I said, he was at least willing to try and responded to tactics advice without throwing his ego about, so you have to give him some credit.  The Paladin was as competent as you’d expect from someone who was clearly the alt of someone with a significant amount of raiding time under their belt.  The hunter was…  well to be honest I’m not even sure the hunter was a hunter, he was so utterly forgettable.  This isn’t a bad thing in a PuG.  He didn’t pull aggro, his dps was fine, he didn’t make an ass of himself, so whatever class he was he did okay.  The feral druid on the other hand…

Oh dear.

Let me just prepare you in advance for this, you’ll need to make sure you’re strapped in so you don’t fall off your chair.  Ready for this?  Strapped in tight?  Here we go.

300dps.

Yeah, you read that right.  Now I know he was using his special attacks because I clearly saw his energy bar moving, so I am utterly at a loss to explain how it was even remotely possible for someone to do less dps in Northrend gear with an enhancement shaman providing melee dps buff totems, than any of my dps characters did at level 60.  You can’t even do 300dps just by autoattacking as a feral druid.  Just by way of comparison, Askara managed to pull 1200 dps in unenchanted gear that she either made herself or got from the same quests the druid should have been doing, and I in NO way, shape or form am particularly good at playing an Enhancement Shaman.  Askara is easily my least-played and newest character.

The mind, quite simply, boggles.

I guess it all goes to show that you just can’t judge a group at face value and expect to be right all the time.

It’s Cataclysmic!
Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to turn this into a Cataclysm post, but is anyone else getting all excited at the thought of Gnome Priests?

No?

Okay, it’s just me, then.

Just a quick note to apologise to everyone for the lack of posts this month.  Work has been keeping me particularly busy, but there’s good stuff coming soon!  In the meantime, why not visit some of the links on the blogroll, they’re all well worth it.  See you all soon.